Starry night, or StarTalk Radio Night? (Of course, you can always have both!)

What night is “StarTalk Radio Night” for you? Are you right there at 7:00 PM ET on Sunday night, waiting for our new podcast to stream through your iTunes? Or do you wait until the kids have gone to bed on Tuesday nights, grab a glass of wine, and listen to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson make the vast reaches of the cosmos seem that much closer and easier to understand? Or maybe you wait until Wednesday or Thursday to listen, casting your own symbolic “No” vote against American Idol with a more fulfilling mix of science, comedy and popular culture.

Whichever night you prefer, we want you to tell us. Your votes will help us decide if we should move the night and time our podcasts premiere.

Please take our poll here and help us decide. It’s only 2 questions long, so it won’t take too much of your time. Polling ends January 26, 2013 at 11:59pm ET.

Thanks again for your help.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!

–Jeffrey Simons

Taylor Alexander

You left off “no preference”!

I have a feeling plenty of people might have no preference – to the point where people who do have a preference are a minority. So you could have 90% of your listeners with no preference, and 10% of them split between seven days of the week, with various times, etc. You could end up with the most popular response to your poll still only representing the concerns of a small percentage of your listeners, but you’d never know because people without a preference can’t take part in the survey.

As a new listener I’ve been busy just burning through past podcasts (all totally amazing by the way!), so I haven’t concerned myself with what time they come out. For me, I’m just happy you’re making them. Release them whenever works for you guys. I’ll listen whenever they come out, and I don’t mind if they’re sometimes an hour or day late – I’m still going to keep coming back to check. Of course consistency may help for other listeners.

The point is, your current survey really can’t provide you with any useful data. You need to find out how many listeners actually care about release times as well as what day/time that should be if applicable. If only a handful of people actually care, you’d be wasting your time trying to cater to them. Even if that handful of people makes up 90% of your survey responses.

Unless you’ve already had enough comments in the past to know how many people care about this.

Jeff

Taylor, in principal I agree with everything you say except for your point. If the majority don’t care, and don’t respond, then it doesn’t matter to them if we cater to the minority. So the majority of people with a preference get satisfaction… and the majority of all people (i.e, your 90% who have no preference) are just as satisfied. As some have pointed out, it’s a podcast, so you can listen to it whenever you want anyway. Just like with a DVR and On Demand, however, there are some things you just don’t want to wait for. As to your last point, we actually have a pretty good response rate as these things go. Our NSF surveys got very participation rates, for example. And we do believe in listening to our audience and our community. We’re all in this together, so to speak. Thanks for your comment, and as a new listener, welcome aboard!

Ott

Saturday evening would be great. Because of time dilation… i mean time zone difference, I could enjoy the show with my Sunday morning coffee.